genres: metalcore
I’d almost given up on Ice Nine Kills. Their first couple full lengths (Safe Is Just A Shadow, & The Predator Becomes The Pray) were insanely good, offering a blend of technical flashiness and a ear for theatrically catchy hooks that stood above nearly anything else in the scene. Then two things happened. Other groups started trying on similar combos to solid effect, and INK leaned further into their cinematic tendencies, first with the excellent (and literature based) Every Trick In The Book, which dialed back the technicality but kept the intensity, then with the horror movie based The Silver Scream, which was disappointingly straightforward. However, given that it was by far their most commercially successful album, I fully expected them to continue down a cinematic hard rock track. They seemed to have other ideas.
Welcome To Horrorwood is a direct continuation in that every song (outside the intro) are based on famous horror films, but musically it is radically different. As soon as the Chucky inspired Assault & Batteries hits, it’s clear that the band was also somewhat bored with the more straightforward approach of the previous album. Circus sounds alternate with math-y metalcore and gloriously melodramatic choruses to create a soundscape that embraces the dichotomously cheesy and disturbing atmosphere of the 80s-00s slashers that make up most of the source material here alongside the band’s more experimental tendencies. It’s almost unfair some of the vocal gymnastics that the band can perform now with the addition of guitarist Ricky Armellino, the first-rate vocalist of This Or The Apocalypse/HAWK in his own right. In a totally excessive flex, a testimony to both the respect the band has in the scene and their flexibility, they also manage to recruit guest vocalists from massive hard rock acts (Papa Roach) to death metal pioneers (Cannibal Corpse).
Picking highlights on this album is hard. Nearly every track is better than their previous album, despite it being a solid and ambitious record by most standards. “Funeral Derangements” is maybe the band’s first experimentation with deathcore, and is deliciously over the top. “Rainy Day” balances an energetic instrumentation with nearly no screams in the band’s best hard rock offering to date. More subtly, the track offers a fun homage to musician/DOOM scorer Mick Gordon, using similarly glitchy effects and filters in a track based around the Resident Evil franchise. The fact that the sole video game based track borrows tricks from the most famous video game composer of the day cannot be an accident. Closing out the highlights, the American Psycho based Hip To Be Scared, is one of the most perfectly self-aware marriages of material from the film and the band’s own past in one of the more adventurous musical tracks on the album.
Not everything is an unqualified success, however. The music stays top notch throughout, but it also doesn’t quite reach the lyrical peaks that INK has hit in the past. Most tracks hit a good balance of gory homage and acknowledgement of the underlying social issues that make much of foundational American horror compelling, and the band isn’t averse to taking these criticisms even beyond the source text. That said, “Wurst Vacation” (based on the Hostel franchise) plays it disappointingly up the middle. For a band that’s been far more aware of misogyny and class consciousness in both their musical genre and subject matter, it’s a potential shame they don’t take a more critical or exploratory lens towards their first encounter with the ‘torture porn’ genre (admittedly I have limited knowledge of the source, but it seems prime for one of their more iconoclastic takes). That said, if the worst thing that can be said about a horror inspired metal album is that they don’t challenge the source materiel’s philosophy more aggressively, it’s got to be a good release.
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